Capacity Planning is a Pain. Predictive Analytics are the Cure.

Let’s face it, planning for capacity is hard. The traditional solution to capacity concerns has been to over-provision IT infrastructure, but this is a wasteful practice that results in under-utilized resources, unnecessary costs, and even an increased carbon footprint. Developing an effective capacity planning strategy involves predicting usage, repeatedly testing performance across various hypothetical infrastructure configurations, and ultimately scheduling changes based on whatever conclusions can be drawn. This is a long, challenging, and costly process that can frustrate even the best engineering teams. How does a company make sure its IT resources are the right size to meet current and future business needs? When should a scaling operation be scheduled to meet the capacity requirements of a company’s growth? What specific infrastructure components need to be altered or improved? How can all of these questions be answered in the most efficient, cost-effective way possible?

We here at Terma Software believe predictive analytics are the solution and we are not alone. Analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) recently conducted research on The Shifting Role of Workload Automation by surveying over 400 IT and business professionals who lead teams or otherwise use workload automation (WLA) tools and dashboards. As discussed in our previous post, one of the major trends impacting WLA is the broader use of data and analytics. In fact, analytics are pervasive – and ninety-six percent of respondents have at least one type of analytics tool in use, with Terma Software as the most popular WLA-specific add-on. EMA also found that capacity analytics are the most common analytics capabilities in use, addressing the most common WLA-related pain point: capacity planning. Effective capacity management is mission-critical to successful business operations and outcomes. Nobody wants a failed product launch because of a misconfigured load balancer or an outage of their retail website on Cyber Monday. Companies need the knowledge to both prevent issues from happening and to provide the flexibility to respond to changing market demands.

This is where predictive analytics and Terma Software’s analytics solutions come into play. Eighty-eight percent of the EMA respondents agreed with the following statement: “predictive analytics help make workload automation more efficient and aligned with my organization’s business.” Predictive analytics have the ability to evaluate historical and real-time data in order to forecast demand, and thus provide valuable insights into expected future resource use. They can point out specific future problem areas and provide accurate predictions for processing times and capacity utilization. This type of proactive workload performance management is possible through TermaUNIFY, a cross-platform predictive analytics solution for WLA environments. Terma’s integrated workload analytics technology can help developers and engineers construct improved workload processes and reconfigure current processes to be more efficient and more reliable. To learn more about how Terma Software’s analytics solutions can address major pain points in workload environments, click here.